They spent the day talking.
Not about plans or routes or the next threat — just talking, the way people talk when they have been given an unexpected pocket of time and don't quite know what to do with the stillness. The Nightmare Spell came up. The mechanics of it, the logic of it, the parts that made sense and the parts that didn't. Nephis mentioned luck at some point — the way it seemed to distribute itself unevenly, the way some people walked through disaster untouched while others couldn't cross a room without finding something wrong.
Quinn said: "Anything under a hundred percent is fifty-fifty. So don't put too much faith in good luck when you have it, and don't write yourself off when you don't. The number in the middle is the only one that matters."
Nobody argued with this.
They talked about their first nightmares. Cassie described hers quietly, with the economy of someone who has processed something enough to speak about it but not enough to enjoy doing so. Sunny said his with the careful selectiveness of a person who has learned that sharing information is a transaction with costs. Nephis said a few things about hers that were more about what she had learned than what she had survived.
Quinn told them about a maze. Strange corridors, shifting walls, the simple objective of finding the right door and walking through it.
"Sounds almost relaxing," Sunny said.
"It had its moments," Quinn said.
He said it easily, which was true in the specific way that things are true when the whole truth is longer and less relevant. He was aware, somewhere in the back of his mind, that at some point in the last several days he had stopped thinking of them as characters in a story he already knew the ending of. They had become people instead — inconveniently, irreversibly, the way people become people when you have hidden from monsters with them and watched them bleed and eaten the last of the dried meat beside them in the rain. He wasn't sure when exactly it had happened. It had happened anyway.
Later, when Nephis drifted to a different part of the cliff to sit alone with whatever she sat alone with, the three of them were quiet for a while.
Then Cassie spoke.
"There's something I didn't tell you," she said. "About the vision. There was another image. Something I kept back."
Sunny looked at her. "Why?"
Cassie smiled, small and tired. "Because knowledge is sometimes the heaviest thing in the world. And I thought — if I didn't say it out loud, maybe it wouldn't become real."
The silence that followed had the quality of three people sitting with that thought and finding it had more weight than they expected.
After a moment Cassie turned her face toward Sunny.
"Can you promise me something?"
"Depends on what it is," Sunny said.
She hesitated. Then: "Can you promise me that you'll look after Neph? Whatever happens."
Sunny was quiet for a moment. He looked at his hands, then at the space where Nephis had gone. "I can't," he said finally. "I can barely look after myself."
He paused. Then he looked at Quinn and pointed.
Cassie turned her head in Quinn's direction.
Quinn raised both hands. "Don't look at me. I worship an Outer God. Being around me, Nephis would probably die faster than average."
Cassie exhaled slowly. The sound of someone who had hoped for a different answer and had known they weren't going to get one.
"I see," she said. "Thank you for listening anyway."
She summoned her walking stick, stood, and made her way to another part of the cliff without looking back.
Quinn watched her go. Sunny watched her go. Neither of them said anything for a while.
The rest of the day passed the way good days pass when you're somewhere terrible — slowly and gratefully. They trained in the afternoon, Nephis running Sunny through the sword work with the patient precision she brought to it, Quinn working through the axe drills on his own and occasionally getting corrected anyway. The scavengers that attempted to climb the cliff in the evening were dealt with quickly — a short ambush, a push, the sound of something large falling a long way. It was almost easy.
They decided to stay one more day.
The storm had changed things. Not just the physical damage — the way it had arrived without warning, the speed of it, the narrowness of what had happened on the cliff face. They needed to know the terrain ahead before they moved into it. They needed to be ready for the next one.
So they rested, and prepared, and watched the water.
By the end of the second night, the scavengers had stopped coming. The cliff was quiet. The shore below was quiet. Whatever signal the creatures had been responding to had moved on.
It was time to move with it.